Alternate Scene in a Railway Carriage Compartment
by Rumour of an Alchemist
Summary: Warning! Silly, fluffy, Alternate Universe, one-shot. It's September the first, 1991, and Hermione Granger is sitting alone in a compartment on her first trip to Hogwarts, trying to read, when people start to drop by...


Disclaimer: I am not J. K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.

Note: The following piece of highly fluffy silliness is set in an alternate universe, on September the first, 1991. The universe ceased to adhere to canon years prior to the events of this piece. Voldemort sent his minions to (successfully) kill Neville Longbottom, thereby invalidating this universe's prophecy, before being defeated in battle by Marauder pranks. Some characters bear very little resemblance to canon, or have no canon counterparts.

This story is a one-shot, excavated from the files to give those who have me on alert something to read whilst I try and finish off other projects.

* * *

Hermione Granger sat in a corner of a compartment, her nose buried in a book, and sighed. It was yet another pair of redheaded lads heading past up along the corridor, nudging and giggling at one another. Or maybe it was the same ones, who kept heading up and down for some delinquent reason. It was annoying, and she hadn't yet figured out a charm to cut the sound off.

The door whizzed open and a dark haired girl with glasses staggered in desperately scratching at her hair as what appeared to be hundreds of small spiders fell out. She stamped on them with her shiny black shoes, again and again as they tumbled. At last she gave a sigh of relief and sank into the seat opposite Hermione.

"Harriet Potter.", the newcomer scowled. "Ugh. I've been pranked by those twin Weasley menaces. Less than an hour and they got me already. Well, they messed with the wrong witch this time. _I_ am the daughter of a Marauder, and my godfather is Serious. Well, he's absolutely crackers, actually, but he's the heir of an ancient and noble house, and he gave me a whole list of useful jinxes to employ upon my enemies."

She pulled out a notebook, and began to flick through it. There were lots of words and little arrows going in all directions in it. Hermione figured they were directions on how to cast spells.

"You're a member of a wizarding family then?" Hermione quizzed, fascinated and unable to restrain herself. Except for the professor who had delivered her letter and taken her shopping in Diagon Alley (a rather nice looking redheaded lady who had said she taught history of magic) this was her first social contact with a real witch or wizard as far as she knew.

"Well obviously." the other girl rolled her eyes. "And since you ask, obviously you were raised by muggles."

"Err, those are non-magical folk?" Hermione hazarded, recalling coming across the term several times in some of the books she'd bought.

"There are five different categories of witches or wizard." Harriet began to tick them off on her fingers. "There are half-bloods who are everyone else; there are pure-bloods who are insane in a bad way; there are pure-bloods who are insane but in a good way; there are muggle-borns, who are witches or wizards with no wizarding parents according to everyone but the pure-bloods who are insane in a bad way; and finally, there are mudbloods who are witches or wizards with no wizarding parents according to the pure-bloods who _are_ insane in a bad way. Actually there are probably more categories than that since there are also half-goblins, half-veelas, crumple horned snorkacks and Dumbledores."

"Crumple horned snorkacks?" Hermione asked.

"Hah! Got you." Harriet giggled. "No of course there aren't, silly, but you should have seen your face."

The door whizzed again and a dark-haired girl with curiously intense green eyes came into the compartment. She seemed to be already dressed in school robes.

"Hi Harriet." the newcomer said.

"Hi Bryony." Harriet responded. "Uggh, the Weasley twins got me with some sort of spider hex."

"Oh I saw that." the newcomer said. "I got them back for you, with a wand-jinx. For the next hour or so, every time either tries to cast a spell, a raven in their house's colours will come out of their wand instead, and sit on one of their heads, cawing." She looked at Hermione, curious. "Who's this?"

"I'm Hermione Granger.", Hermione said.

"She's a muggle-born." Harriet added.

"Bryony Snape. My mum was a muggle-born." Bryony introduced herself to Hermione. "Don't worry. Once the jerks who are pure-bloods find something better to do than pick on you, you should be okay. And apparently it's not as bad these days as it was at the height of the Wizarding War when You-Know-Who and his Death Eaters were recruiting."

"You-Know-Who?" Hermione frowned. "I've seen a wizard referred to as that several times in books. Was that actually his name?"

"His _real_ name was Tom Marvolo Riddle." Bryony answered. She was rummaging in her pockets. "He called himself 'Lord Voldemort' though because he thought that sounded much better and it's an anagram of his real name with 'I am' to go with it."

She pulled out a box of something. Apparently her pockets were much bigger than they looked. "Sweet?" She offered the box with a wink at Hermione. "Don't worry. I already used all the joke ones on a compartment of Slytherin wannabes."

"Umm, my parents are dentists – that's muggles who treat tooth problems – and I don't think they'd approve, thank-you very much." Hermione declined.

"Suit yourself." Bryony shrugged and helped herself to one. "I'm sure it's been several centuries since sweets in the wizarding world caused tooth problems but all the more for us, eh, Harriet?"

"Yep." Harriet happily grabbed a couple and popped them into her mouth. Then she went back to studying her notebook. She pulled her wand out, and started to occasionally twitch it, muttering stuff to herself.

Bryony looked at what Harriet was doing.

"What's that you've got?"

"Lesser broom-jinxing hex." Harriet replied. "A relic from 'Project Overdrive', Uncle Sirius said." She giggled. "Those were the glory-days of the Marauders. Father says every minute of every detention he served because of 'Project Overdrive' was worth it."

"Oh, Overdrive." Bryony furrowed her brow. "Mum lost her prefect position over her bit in that. She talks about it as a 'piece of teenage silliness on an epic scale', and makes out it was a _very_ bad thing to do, but she doesn't sound like she's convinced it _was_ all that bad. I mean they just made the whole Slytherin quidditch team look totally humiliated and helpless and beat them by about a thousand points, and the Slytherins back in those days were sufficiently unpleasant that they probably _deserved_ it."

Hermione goggled. She hadn't read much about quidditch, but she had seen enough to know that a victory margin of anywhere in the region of a thousand points was quite substantial. And she'd seen only one reference to the wizard sport of quidditch in _Hogwarts, A History_ for recent years.

"Was that why they rewrote the rules for the inter-house quidditch competition in 1976?" Hermione asked, eager to show she wasn't a completely out-of-touch muggle. "The Gryffindor-Slytherin game?"

It turned out that that question was a _bad_ mistake for Hermione to ask. It meant that both Bryony and Harriet thought that she was interested in quidditch, and started talking about it. And talking about it. And _talking_ about it…

Hermione was all one for finding out new information about things, but she was being bombarded with a positive _blizzard_ of information here about things called 'quaffles' and 'air resistance' and 'inertia compensation charms' and 'wronski feints' and 'Potter-Black rolls' (or was it 'Black-Potter rolls'? she'd lost track somewhere along the line) and 'three-cornered hats' and 'reverse goal theory' that even _she_ couldn't assimilate it all.

And then the two of them got on to discussing quidditch teams and to her horror Hermione found herself being asked which team _she_ supported?

"Err, Argyle Amblers?" Hermione said, her memory having overloaded and shutdown and producing the name of the only team which had stuck out at her.

"Oh, you poor thing." Harriet said.

"At least she's not a Cannons fan." Bryony said. "At least the Amblers occasionally finish in the middle of the table."

At which point a redheaded boy wandered into the compartment.

"Has anyone seen my?…" he began and stopped. "Hey! The Chudley Cannons are a _good_ team! They're just a bit unlucky is all."

"Poorly managed, more likely." Harriet begged to differ.

Which left Hermione now trapped in a compartment with not two but _three_ nutcases all talking quidditch.

It wasn't until several hours later, when a prefect came along with a toad which someone had misplaced, that Hermione discovered what the redheaded boy (apparently called Ron Weasley) had originally been looking for.

"Hey, Warty!" Ron grabbed the toad, and proceeded to actually _kiss_ it.

The toad croaked and squirmed, but was trapped by its owner as the prefect escaped.

The other two girls seemed fascinated by the toad, and the conversation turned rapidly into the channel of feeding habits and the surprisingly many (and for the most part disgusting sounding) uses of toad slime.

In the end, to preserve what was left of her rapidly unravelling sanity, Hermione had to divert the conversation back onto the subject of quidditch.

* * *

Author Notes:

Yes, Ronald Weasley has a pet toad instead of a pet rat in this universe. For one thing there wasn't a handy disguised rat animagus looking to hide at The Burrow...

To the best of my knowledge there is no quidditch team extant in canon at the time of writing known as 'The Argyle Amblers'. As far as I know I made them up, and they exist only in this particular alternate universe. I wanted a name for a quidditch team which a Hermione Granger suffering from information overload might recall when pressed to express an opinion, and 'Argyle Amblers' seemed both suitably simple and catchy.

For what it matters, Severus Snape sorted into Gryffindor in this universe, at which point canon obviously went down the drain. After a couple of initial frosty years, he eventually joined forces with (and became friends with) James/Sirius/Remus/Peter. The universe never recovered.

Severus married Lily and James married someone or other else. Bryony and Harriet are their respective eldest children.

Peter Pettigrew never felt the need to turn on his friends and side with Voldemort, and Sirius never ended up in Azkaban.

Voldemort found out about this universe's version of Trelawney's prophecy from a spy in the Ministry (most likely Rookwood) and infiltrated the Ministry to listen to the whole prophecy himself. Neville Longbottom was the only boy born who to Voldemort's mind fitted the prophecy description, and he sent Bellatrix and half a dozen Death Eaters to take care of that particular problem for him.

Unfortunately for Lord Voldemort when, over-confident at the 'defeat' of the child of prophecy (even though Bellatrix got taken out by a bouncing killing curse in the process), he attacked Hogwarts to try and destroy Dumbledore, the Marauders were waiting for him, and an ignominious defeat.

This story is a one-shot. It _is_ highly silly and fluffy, and not intended to be a serious attempt at either writing or to conform to canon.

Update:

In response to a query from one early reviewer, I hadn't thought much up Severus having an animagus form, but for the purposes of _this_ particular alternate universe I'd go with an idea I saw by 'KatieLeanne17' in a short-story 'Snape's Secret' and say penguin animagus. And that, of course, would result in a Marauder name of 'Pablo' (after a penguin in a 1940 Disney film that might still be bouncing around cinemas and on TV in the 1970's).


End file.
